One misunderstood fact about Scratch is that, for any project, Scratch uses two types of statistics. First, there are the real stats. These are the stats (views, loves, favorites...) that you see when you click on a project. Scratch updates them every time someone views, loves, favorites... a project, so they are very accurate. The second type of statistics linked to any project is the Search stats. As the name suggests, these stats are the only stats being used to order projects on Search and Explore. In other words, these stats determine where your project will be placed on Search and Explore. The Search stats are not updated every time someone views a project, but instead need to frequently be updated to the real stats by Scratch's servers to stay as accurate as possible to the real stats, else the Search stats will be way lower.


The problem is Scratch is often not reliable at updating the Search stats of projects, so these stats often stay extremely low for months no matter what the real stats are, which affects where projects appear on Search and Explore. So, for example, a project could have 100 000 real views, but be stuck at 1 Search views which means that the project will be at the bottom of the results even though the project has thousands of real views. This example project will only show up at the appropriate place on Search and Explore when Scratch's servers will update the Search stats to the real ones for this particular project, which can take months.


So, by showing both the real stats and the Search stats of any project and also whether or not a project is indexed, ScratchViews allows you to understand where and why any project shows up on Search and Explore.



When a project is shared on Scratch, it won't immediately show up on Search when you search for it. But why?


This is because it needs to be indexed first. So, when a project is shared, Scratch's indexer notices that it has just been shared and indexes it, which means that the information related to that project (title, description, views, loves...) gets sent to the Search database. Once that's done the project will show up on Search. But keep in mind that the information that was sent to the Search database won't change until the project is reindexed by Scratch.


So, for example, if you change the title of a project that was already indexed (visible on Search), the project won't immediately show up when searching for the new title, because the information has not been updated in the search database yet. The reindexing process can take up to a few months and until then, the project will stay at the same position on Search, because the Search stats for this project won't be changed in the Search database. Keep in mind that the code that controls the indexing process is not public, so it is near impossible to understand exacly how it works.



On may 3rd a new section was added to the ScratchViews user profiles! It is the Best projects list. This section's main goal is to show the user's projects that are the most appreciated by the Scratch community, no matter how much views they have. So the Most Viewed Projects and the Best Projects lists should differ.


The Best Projects list is created with an algorithm that gives a score to each of the user's projects and then orders them based on the scores. The score is meant to represent how appreciated the project is by the scratch community. Keep in mind that the method used the create the Best Projects is subjective, but it should give a pretty accurate representation of the user's best projects.



It is important to know key differences between the Scratch Explore page and the ScratchViews explore page. Although they both use an algorithm to add projects to themselves, ScratchViews' algorithm is way more selective and only allow projects which meet a high quality standard. This means that the projects that will appear on ScratchViews' explore page will be more elaborate, polished and safe, but this also means that the ScratchViews Explore page will add less projects compared to the regular Scratch Explore page. On average, there should be a few new projects added to ScratchViews' project collection every week.


Also, the ScratchViews Explore page does not have a "trending" page and the default page is the Recent one which shows the latest projects that are in ScratchViews' collection. This means that the main criteria for a project to appear on the ScratchViews explore page is not the stats, but rather its quality and how appreciated it is by the community. This also means that all scratchers can go on the explore page as long as their projects are at the same quality level as the rest of the projects on ScratchViews' explore page. Other than the Recent page, on ScratchViews you'll also see the option to filter projects by popularity (order based on views) and by ratings (use a similar formula than the Best projects section discussed just above).


If you want one of your projects on the ScratchViews Explore page, I recommend working hard on a project and, if it is very appreciated by the community, it might have a chance to be picked up by ScratchViews algorithm and than added to the ScratchViews Explore page! There might also be a studio in the future where it will be possible to submit projects to be added to the ScratchViews explore page.



As part of update 3.0 of ScratchViews, a new section was added to the website's homepage: The daily featured projects section. ScratchViews already has a growing collection of quality projects on its explore page, but because it is very large, it can sometime feel overwhelming to explore. This is why from now on, 4 new projects will randomly be selected from scratchviews' collection and featured on ScratchViews homepage. Also, projects that will appear in this section have below 10000 views, so there is a good chance that these projects are underated and that you have not seen them before. So give them a try!



As a way to thank donors for supporting the website, ScratchViews gives them the ScratchViews Supporter badge which will appear on their ScratchViews user page. After the donation is made on Kofi.com, the donor will receive an automatic email from [email protected] containing a unique 20-character text key. This key can be used on ScratchViews' donor validation page to enter a Scratch username so that ScratchViews can display the badge on the right user page.

The reason for this process is that, otherwise, ScratchViews would not know which username to add the badge to and it was important for me (the developer) to give, at least, a small thing in return for people who donated to this project. This is the best way I could think of to make it work!